All posts tagged Payments

Two hours after introducing a pair of larger iPhones, a new smartwatch, and a new payments system, Apple’s normally reserved CEO Tim Cook said he was still riding high on adrenaline.

The event marked a defining moment for Cook, who has been dogged by questions about whether he, as CEO, would be able to sustain Apple’s product-making magic. He seemed firmly in command of the company on its most significant new product announcement since he took over as CEO in 2011. Read More »

Founded in 2010, Zooz started out as a mobile payments system, but later added a more comprehensive set of tools, including a web service. The company names IKEA and Groupon Inc. among its customers. Read More »

Online payment service Stripe wants to make it easier for merchants to sell goods and services to the country with the world’s largest Internet population.

Using Stripe’s payment software, merchants can now detect if a shopper is located in mainland China and give them the option of paying with their account on Alipay, the Alibaba-owned service with more than 300 million users, Stripe Co-Founder and Chief Executive Patrick Collison said in an interview. Read More »

Max Levchin spent a year searching for the perfect person to lead his new online-lending startup until he realized it was him.

Levchin, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded payments company PayPal and game maker Slide, is returning to the role of chief executive for the first time in four years to run Affirm, a startup hatched out of his technology incubator last year, he said in an interview. Read More »

Square, the maker of credit-card reading devices that plug into smartphones and tablets, secured a new line of credit from a group of banks led by Goldman Sachs Group, two people familiar with the matter said.

The banks providing the credit facility also include Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Barclays and Silicon Valley Bank, the people said. It will give Square access to more than $100 million should the company need extra capital, one of the people said.

The additional borrowing power will help Square expand the number of merchants who use its readers and pay small fees each time they swipe a transaction. Square has raised more than $340 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Visa. The business is not profitable, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey has said. Read More »

Peter Hazlehurst, director of product management at Google Wallet, has left the Internet company, the latest executive departure from Google’s mobile-payments business.

Hazlehurst’s last day was Monday. He had been at Google since 2011 and in the Google Wallet role since 2012. He said his next move will likely be outside the payments business and will take him into the start-up world. He declined to be more specific. Read More »

Square, the payments company known for its smartphone and tablet credit card readers, has reached a deal with Whole Foods to offer its checkout system at several U.S. stores, the second national retailer to allow card processing from the startup.

The deal comes more than a year after Square partnered with coffee purveyor Starbucks to process payments at thousands of its stores and suggests the San Francisco company may be eyeing bigger fish than the food trucks and mom-and-pop shops where it is commonplace. Read More »

It’s a payment ritual as familiar as handing over a $20 bill, and it’s soon to go extinct: prepare to say farewell to the swipe-and-sign of a credit card transaction.

Beginning later next year, you will stop signing those credit card receipts. Instead, you will insert your card into a slot and enter a PIN number, just like people do in much of the rest of the world. The U.S. is the last major market to still use the old-fashioned signature system, and it’s a big reason why almost half the world’s credit card fraud happens in America, despite the country being home to about a quarter of all credit card transactions. Read More »

Apple reported first-quarter earnings that were virtually flat from a year earlier as stiffer competition took some shine off of growing iPhone and iPad sales. On its conference call with analysts, Apple was upbeat about its business. Here are five takeaways from the report and Apple’s subsequent call. Read More »